That community is where open source tech tends to come from.

A company selling me widgets wouldn't store or let another company store extra information about me if it subjected them the widget seller to HIPAA. Or better yet, something more stringent.

We don't need the government to be antagonistic toward corporations; we just need a government that makes the corporations internalize the risk they're making us take.

[1] The fact that ToS are enforceable when every court in the country knows that only a vanishly small percentage of people ever read them, much less understand them, means that they're not doing their job.

I agree with this.

I'm a civil servant and I know (personally; my work is nowhere near the labs) a number of people who work or have worked in that weird contracting DOE/DOD structure that includes the labs.

The difference I've seen is far more from the nature of work rather than the employment details.

At some point, we need to push back against the reality in the US that we have effectively no way to stop mass harvesting (and then breaching) of our PII -- and there's basically zero downside to companies when it happens.

I find that AI can be incredibly useful, but just text dumping its output into a conversation feels insulting.

I support gun control.

This feels like theater, not gun control.

If they ban bog standard VPNs and find out they're still being used, they'll punish the VPN companies.

If the VPN companies create workarounds and avoid the punishment, they'll punish the payment processors.

If the VPN companies start using esoteric workarounds and taking cryptocurrency for payment, then they've mostly won -- most people aren't going to deal with that shit.

All the while, they'll still go after the social media/etc companies for allowing circumvention of age-gating. So the social media companies will crack down on our ability to visit their sites with any sort of privacy.

My point: laws are all imperfect but can still have a huge effect. Pointing out work arounds doesn't change that.

For context, I'm really disturbed by the recent move to punish people seeking privacy instead of the social media companies that are enabling this social media shit. They know who the companies are, since that's who they're going to punish for not age gating. But they'd (I'm talking about US based age-gating pushes as well) rather fuck with our privacy and make our PII more susceptible to data breaches than tell the social media companies to eat shit.

Standing outside talking to friends after the sun set, where it's still over 100F outside: I could feel brief (minor) chills pass over me as I'd sweat in bursts and it'd instantly evaporate.

And back when I was cycling, I'd start summer rides about an hour before dawn, when it'd be at its coldest (sometimes 90F for the low). I learned to not rub my face because I'd have salt crystals from dried sweat, and they would abrade skin near the corners of my eyes.

You can decide to not fix the panel that was being used to power a GPU.

Or you could sell the power back.

Or you could put it in a battery bank for when the sun is down.

Or, if none of those are the case and you just have excess power that's useless for anything but a GPU, then you prepaid for the GPU.

I love that we have solar panels, but we weren't gifted them. Using power has a cost.

But I do think that this is a much better start than letting companies ignore the impact to software consumers or having open source devs be on the hook for volunteer work.

I'm thrilled that companies are liable for crap that ends up hurting other people. I don't think they should get an easy way out, and I also like that there's a carve out for people who aren't making money off of software (like OSS devs.)

So Google could, for example, switch from a tiny "this could be wrong!" byline to having the AI be less overconfident every freaking time regardless of whether it's spouting made up crap or actual facts.

The scale doesn't sound like a way out. If your company expects to get away with doing the wrong thing where smaller companies can't, then the solution isn't to continue getting away with it.

Because the military doesn't give soldiers rifles with guard rails. They give the soldiers intense, rigid training, and then try to enforce discipline and correct use socially.

If an LLM is going to be important in that way (this seems like a very contrived way,) then it's in the interest of the LLM's host to make sure it doesn't have guard rails that would get in the way _that_ way.

Open protocols are still there and still used, but we're sad because the smaller userbase is frustrating. Just like how people still publish human written content to personal blogs, but they're proportionally non-existent.

Why does Google think it's a good idea to make that the case even if you don't block their crawlers?

Those people would heavily incentivized to protect their ability to vote.